Bird on a High Branch"I marvel that men seek fish where only treetops are." - All Men Are Brothers Shi Nai'an and Luo Guanzhong (trans. Pearl Buck)

By Royston Tester

I

"In The Second Month Of The Fourth Year Of Established Calm An Earthquake Struck" Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong

A burgundy pump.

Stiletto heel --- from the foggy sedan on Gongti Beilu, one June morning.

He did not often see that.

There.

No movie crθche, or pixels, either.

A snug, ample thigh. How Wang Jing glimpsed the flesh, and shied away. Thrust his shoulder against the chute cackling cement footings into new, straw-laden ground at Gong San Plaza  'A Complex Area Between Workers Stadium and San Li Tun,' as the glossy hoardings put it. At this site perimeter, far and near, where the shoe stepped out. 'Drunk in the last minute, then meeting. Tel: 588 8888.'

"'Let's pretend these people are animals '" Li Fan recited, in her Shanghai way, flushing, haughty; all amateur surprise. A half-dozen students giggled; perched behind yellow desks at Teahouse Corner in Liu Hebei village. "'...and each shoot arrows into the sky.'"

In the commune school that day, nothing was funnier.

Li Fan smirked too  as much because her first day's lesson went so well: Zhao's Orphan, the ancient text she quoted; title scratched on a board, 'Remonstration in the Peach Garden.'

Li Fan was twenty years old  a recent graduate, serious and keen, with slender hands, glossy hair, and barely discernible lisp. A French concession landlord's daughter.

Wang Jing, sixteen, the only son of Xingtai soybean farmers. "What does 'remonstration' mean?" she asked.

Who knew?

He observed her peachy breasts.

Wang Jing did not discover what lay beyond those opening scenes  the 'Crimson Cloud Tower over a terrace,' 'scent wafting for miles around'  dictated, repeated, inscribed in chalk, at single-storey Teahouse Corner, over six weeks.

In forty-odd years in Beijing, wifeless as he was, he pondered these mysteries but could not solve them.

In the loneliest spells  and there were many for such a shamefaced, hardworking man, 'parallel citizen', a legal and not legal migrant, paying his own protection  he would recite verbatim the Orphan passages, the story of a kitchen blade, and titles that once hung beside a window.

This false start in life, its cavities.

How many times you could utter 'remonstration.'

Here.

Where no-one heard a peep from Snail.

*

Chapter One: 'Remonstration in the Peach Garden'

"It is said that Duke Ling of the State of Jin during the Warring States Period, who came to the throne as a child, was a petulant youngster of unstable temperament. But, fortunately for his realm, the influence of his benign forbears, dukes Wen and Xiang, still lingered, and the people were content and industrious."

*

"This is the 'nail-headed rat-tail,'" she would say, forming the stroke. "You draw one."

Thick-pawed Wang Jing followed.

"That's more the 'unraveled hemp rope.' Try again."

For hours into the night they created line on scraps of paper  and, in hushed voices, talked of threaded shapes, and dots. As though their lives depended on it.

"These are 'horses' teeth.'"

Everything became lines, that April 1966: out loud in the mildewed classroom; Li Fan's drawing beneath the kerosene lamp when, at 8pm, the electricity shut off; the corners of his eyes; the lines his sentimental Uncle Jia fed him...about Jing's family in Xingtai.

"Where are your parents, Snail?" she asked, using his nickname, fearing they perished in the famine six years before.

"Neighbours are still searching for them," he replied unevenly, gazing into the table; at 'dragon veins'  though he did no know them as that.

March had been a month of earthquake  and suicides of high-ranking government officials in the capital, two hundred miles north.

"Shaking the four seas, shaking the five continents," his uncle kept muttering; Jia's phrase for any upheaval. A short-tempered man  known as Short-Arse Jia  who, as commune leader, housed refugees, as well as his relatives, fleeing the Xingtai destruction. "Eight thousand lives lost," he would intone, pacing the courtyard. Adding it up.

"I hope your mother and father are found," said Li Fan, tailing off 'bundles of brushwood,' touching his forearm.

"A month," he replied, acknowledging her sweep across the page.

Fingertip through down.

"There is always jihui," she reminded him.

A chance.

Snail knew what he knew.

Uncle Jia would eventually say.

*

Chapter One: 'Remonstration in the Peach Garden'

"As the years went by and Duke Ling attained manhood, his nature became even more depraved, his extravagance knew no bounds, and he plundered the people mercilessly to pay for an orgy of constructing palaces and pleasure domes. He held human life in complete disregard; if anything, no matter how slight, irritated him, he would unleash a whirlwind of executions of innocent people."

*

Wang Jing slept fitfully on the schoolroom floor amongst the other evacuees  and near Li Fan. In the mornings, his aunt Dong Mei prepared corn cake. The group drank tea. Every eighth day, and for good fortune, she cooked an egg.

More recently, when the loudspeaker announced a call on Liu Hebei's village phone, a jumpy Wang Jing girded himself to learn nothing. Or worse. There was chatter from Beijing  and not only of General Ruiqing's leap from a third-storey window; an unsuccessful suicide.

"His colleagues are laughing at him," Li Fan heard. "Our Head of State, Liu Shaoqi, told everyone, 'You have to have technique...heavy head and light feet, but he arrived feet first.'

Wang Jing lit the kerosene lamp in his uncle's courtyard on Crabapple Blossom Road; took out sheaves of crumpled paper, ink. He did not want to understand this gossip or the political reasons for his uncle's meetings in Beijing. Li Fan handed him a brush  to practice 'wrinkles on a demon's face.'

In the brisk evening, early May.

"The leaders are throwing themselves out of buildings?"

"Some are," she replied, a line spilling from beneath Snail's nervous grip. "Den Xiaoping said Ruiqing 'jumped like a female athlete diver...a lolly on a stick.'"

"They must be frightened," said Wang Jing, thinking of his unsuspecting father and mother, silent by the unlit hearth  and how mudbrick walls could part like lips. Of trembling hands, fresh air, and dust upon his cheeks. Why would anyone choose death? Or mock someone spared?

"Nice," remarked Li Fan of his strokes across the paper  avoiding further word of grisly Beijing and its hasty summoning of Party officials.

"Prince Hui's cook was cutting up a bullock. Every blow of his hand, every heave of his shoulders, every tread of his foot, every thrust of his knee, every whshh of rent flesh, every chkk of the chopper was in perfect harmony  rhythmical like the dance of the Mulberry Grove, simultaneous like the chord of the Ching Shou. 'Well done!' cried the Prince. 'Yours is skill indeed.'"

*

In the lamplight, Li Fan trotted out series of 'bands dragged through the mud chopper'  which brightened Snail's eyes; so eager for a precise beginning, and a careful tailing off.

With close-touching dots, Li Fan soldiered across the plain.

"Rat footprints, Li lao shi?"

She shook her head.

"Mi Fei dots," Li Fan told him. "Like broken ink."

"A dot or a line?"

Wang Jing gazed at the watercourse magic.

"Neither."

"You're teasing me Li teacher."

"They help build 'dragon veins,'" she explained. "The invisible part, like breath."

Wang Jing frowned.

"It gives a painting life, Snail."

"I preferred 'cow hair'" he said, grabbing the brush.

"You're past that."

Lifting it back.

To and fro they struggled.

"Shanghai made you like this?" he gasped.

"To behave so rudely to a man?"

"Yes."

"You're not a man," she whispered.

He dashed his hand against the paper.

"Living in the French concession made you smart?"

"I'm you're elder," she replied. "You ask too many questions."

Li Fan looked about  at Uncle Jia's chipped window-frame.

"Settle down, Wang Jing."

He snatched the brush.

"Let go, you freak," she ordered. You bing. Yanking it back.

He tickled her ribs  hill-valley-hill  until she squealed. Well...squeaked. Clouds around her arms and wrists. White, pink.

In Snail's shadow across the table.

"Eh, ye!"

Kissing her lips.

Bird on a high branch  nest below.

*

Chapter One: 'Remonstration in the Peach Garden'

"The tower commanded a panoramic view which reached to the horizon; the whole of the capital city and its inhabitants came under the gaze of the viewer from its height. Duke Ling was transported with joy to receive this unexpected gift from Tu'an Gu, and straightway concluded that his chief bodyguard was the most devoted, loyal and capable of all his subjects."

*

II

"In The First Year Of Radiant Harmony Hens Were Transformed Into Roosters" Three Kingdoms by Luo Guanzhong

"Look out, Wang Jing!"

It near killed him; the umber crane-bird of steel and cables tumbling from such height. Its wing clipping his yellow helmet, shoulder; slamming into crawler tracks at Gong San Plaza.

Pain, sudden and intense, like a nudge become a stabbing, claw. Cutting down the fifty-eight year old man  in seconds.

He sought an exit. An opening.

Walk, stride, he told himself.

"It needs the hospital," several co-workers agreed, running past a muddied forklift; two Harbin men pressing rags into the base of Jing's neck. His head undone.

Only walking will matter, Wang Jing thought. I must march.

"Let's get the foreman's van."

"Jing, Wang Jing?"

At this instant, a mother would recall her child; a husband, his wife. Wang Jing  blood across his throat  remembered wire.

A young woman's torn flesh.

"I know Beijing hospital," he told his Shenzhen outrigger boss. Or believed he did. "I can walk to the hospital." Confidently. As Li Fan strode into his uncle's village for six weeks  into the Liu Hebei schoolroom, all those years ago.

The work gang restrained him. It felt like that. Wang Jing on his feet, pushing men aside. It felt like that too.

"There are emergency rooms nearer," the company supervisor, an Urumqi migrant, told him.

"Bollocks," replied Wan Jing. Did he say that?

He knew Beijing Hospital.

That was it.

I can tread in reverse, he consoled himself. To ease the spine  strengthen my heart. I will speak in Li Fan's tongue. Talk her talk. Like tunes in a parade: Zhao's Orphan. Recite lines. I will smoke.

Protesting, the crew released him.

Wang Jing shrugged the bloody cloths. Tight.

Felt nothing.

Like a cat  from a tall tree  that regained its nerve, or filled its belly, he crept backwards, inch by inch, finding ground. His compass, fissures in a tea egg; momentum, slithering down  like skin without joint or bone.

"He'll never make it." Said the faces of Gong San Plaza.

As Wang Jing  Snail  shuffled from the site.

*

Chapter One: 'Remonstration in the Peach Garden'

"Zhao Dun kowtowed before the duke's carriage. 'Your unworthy servant,' he said. 'Ventures to have something to inform you of, Your Majesty. I hope you will have the magnanimity to indulge me. I have heard that a virtuous ruler uses music to gladden the hearts of the people, while a ruler who lacks virtue uses music only to gladden his own heart. From ancient times, it has been the practice of rulers to take their pleasure either within the palace with the courtesans and servants or abroad hunting and sightseeing. Never has it been heard that an upright ruler kills people for sport. Such atrocities as setting savage mastiffs on, or shooting, harmless passersby, and dismembering a cook for some trifling misdemeanour are unheard of even for unrighteous rulers. But Your Majesty has been guilty of all these things! If you spill blood so promiscuously, the common people will rebel and the other feudal lords will invade our state, and then the disasters attendant upon the fall of the tyrants Jie of Xia Dynasty and Zhou of the Shang Dynasty will befall Jin! It is because your humble servant cannot bear to sit by and watch the ruin of our country that I dare to risk death by speaking so bluntly. I beseech Your Majesty to turn your carriage around, return to the court and mend your ways by devoting yourself to affairs of state. No more frittering away day after day in petty pleasure-seeking, and no more taking of innocent lives! Only then will Jin be pulled back from the brink of disaster, and Your Majesty follow in the footsteps of the sage kings Yao and Shun.' Having said this, he kept kneeling in front of the duke's carriage."

At first light, Snail rode his Flying Pigeon bicycle to the Commune Clinic  and knocked at the grating.

Kissing Li teacher was an idiotic act. He went too far. Later this morning, in the classroom, she would remain insulted, hurt. On his return from the capital, Uncle Jia would beat him! Li Fan, resign. Or run away. Had she filed a complaint with Lui Hebei's Party secretary? Or with Bumps on the Face who  as village barefoot doctor  right now peered through a wooden hatch?

"Ah," said the bespectacled man, evidently from deep sleep; waving Wang Jing into the office.

Snail sniffed bother.

"Your parents..." announced Bumps, removing his glasses.

The teenager nodded.

Gazing at moles beside the physician's nostrils.

Flared.

"I'm sorry."

Snail nodded again. Fear  lead white  in his eyes.

Doctor and student faced one another across the threadbare kwang.

"Your shushu Jia arrives from Beijing this afternoon," Bumps went on. "He will take you to Xingtai."

Wang Jing stared.

Shook the man's hand. Memory of Li Fan  her touch, a kiss  receding with the gentle clasp.

Tears fell across his mouth.

Father and mother were seated, that was all; a grinning brick before him.

"'Sire,' replied the cook. 'I have always devoted myself to Tao. It is better than skill. When I first began to cut up bullocks, I saw before me simply whole bullocks. After three years' practice, I saw no more whole animals (but saw them, so to speak, in sections). And now I work with my mind and not with my eye. When my senses bid me stop, but my mind's eye urges me on, I fall back on eternal principles. I follow such openings or cavities as there may be, according to the natural constitution of the animal. I do not attempt to cut through joints; still less through large bones.'"

*

Outside the clinic, Wang Jing headed for the public latrines on Ten Thousand Butterflies Street.

"These are our leader's orders," the county-level official Cheng Guangjin told her. "I'm to replace you if you don't comply."

Snail felt anguish at the sight of Li Fan. His pulse galloped like Mi Fei dots.

Too distraught about his parents to do a moral duty, or worry about new schools and old, he would defer the apology.

Rehearsed all night.

Snail turned to the soybean field  villagers bowed to their tasks. He would seek refuge in the peach orchards behind Zhang Yang's fertilizer factory.

*

Chapter One: 'Remonstration in the Peach Garden'

"The sight of the duke, apparently in a state of abject contrition and whimpering like a child, dispelled the towering rage that had been bursting in Zhao Dun's breast. The prime minister did not know whether to laugh or frown. He felt like a negligent father facing his wayward son; indignation and affection, shame and regret struggled within him. Then, remembering his authority, he stood in front of the Gate to the Peach Garden, resolutely barring the way for the duke."

*

Suddenly, Party official Cheng slapped Li Fan hard.

The insubordinate Shanghai girl staggered, and fell against the playground bucket.

Mastering the grief he felt for his family, Snail rushed to assist Li Fan supporting her elbow.

"What are you doing?" barked Cheng. "This broken shoe is a counterrevolutionary. Li Fan must change her conduct."

"'Broken shoe'?" she repeated, aghast. A prostitute?

Snail flinched.

"Are you hurt, Li Fan lao shi?"

She was dusting her sleeve, and thigh.

Fingermarks along her jaw.

"I'm not hurt," she told him, averting her eyes.

"You will be my instructional assistant," Cheng informed Li Fan, ushering the students, and a disgruntled Condor, Eunuch, and Longface Donkey into the premises.

"Long live Chairman Mao!" roared Longface Donkey through the window, ripping posters from the wall.

Speechless classmates jostled for the kill.

Snail stepping backwards.

A stunned Cheng beckoned his assailant.

"Li lao shi is honourable," the youth declared.

Turning, fleeing to his uncle's house.

"Come back, delinquent child!"

Not a soul pursued Wang Jing. The gravity of his offence sealed. All face lost.

"Death of a thousand cuts..." he heard chanted from the school.

As he raced by Liu Hebei's latrines.

"I need to piss."

At Crabapple Blossom Road, so wishing to put matters right with Li Fan; yet alone with thoughts of his mother and father; he leaned against the crooked trunk of a cedar to await shushu Jia from Beijing.

"A good cook changes his chopper once a year  because he cuts. An ordinary cook, once a month  because he hacks. But I have had this chopper nineteen years, and although I have cut up many thousand bullocks, its edge is as if fresh from the whetstone. For at the joints there are always crevices, and the edge of a chopper being without thickness, it remains only to insert that which is without thickness into such a crevice. By these means the crevice will be enlarged, and the blade will find plenty of room. It is thus that I have kept my chopper for nineteen years as though fresh from the whetstone."

*

III

ESTABLISHED CALM:

"Move on, old man," said the security lad, at Oakwood Residences 'A Gentleman's Private Castle,' 'Senechal of Genteelness.' Wang Jing had walked backwards past the Workers Stadium; through the narrower 'Russian' streets at the foot of Ritan Park.

At the Ancient Observatory, he would turn right.

"Who said I was stopping?" Wang Jing glared. "Sha bi."

Stupid cunt.

He rested, nevertheless  beneath an electricity pylon, alongside a cluster of silver birches. Everything bordered by scaffolding from a development  Fortune Heights  that ran a city block. 'Ocean Honoured Chateau,' 'Seducing Modern and Romantic Imagination' (someone had defaced the 'S').

Wang Jing sucked at a discarded 7Up  the can slipping away. His Gong San Plaza accident was far worse than he imagined. Eyes smarting; throat ablaze  a draught of fire into his brain.

He was in two pieces.

Torn flesh.

Like a man at a cat, he grabbed at the place where his skull once reigned. Pulpy wetness greeted him.

At Gong San Plaza, he had not realised his head was sliced cleanly away  pitched like a softball, in one glorious arc, onto a first-storey girder; landing at the foot of an astonished electrician eating a peach.

(IN UNISON):

"RED GUARDS ARE NOT AFRAID OF HARDSHIP ON THE MARCH"

The Oakwood sentry muttered urgently into a cellphone.

Trucks lumbered in and out of Fortune Heights, welders on one knee, a bulldozer shuddering against the ground, teams of labourers manoeuvring steel mesh.

If my crown is gone, thought Wang Jing  why do I not gaze on the straw-laden mud of Gong San Plaza? Why do I have this view?

How have I come so far?

Beyond, like a stormy shoreline, the Third Ring Road bore its load.

What could relentless overpass-traffic sing?

(IN UNISON):

"Today I will seize you!I'll make your muscles crampTake off your skinPlay soccer with your skull!"

Suddenly the Great Helmsman appeared. Ha-ha-ha. The greatest, great day of Snail's life. Mao Zedong on that rally balcony. Parading. An hour for every second Wang Jing endured  this June morning.

Can you hear the cheering, Li Fan?

Frenzy, joy? More people than I had ever seen.

Mao.

His simple proclamation crackling from loudspeakers  and so difficult to hear above the yelling and song. His thick Hunan accent.

(SOLO):

"IMBALANCE AND HEADACHE ARE A GOOD THING"

China's leaders before us. A ribbon of men in the far distance  like your dots, Li Fan  on that terracotta wall. We believed it; we looked in that direction  and saw what we saw.

You were not in Tiananmen.

Li Fan.

After my betrayal, how could you be?

(IN UNISON):

"WE PUT ON OUR BLOOD-SOAKED STRAW SANDALS"

"IRON SOLES DYE THE SEA OF FLOWERS RED"

Head throbbing, fiery draught at his neck, Wang Jing stood up. The Third Ring Road with him; CCTV building in step. He would, after all, make it to the hospital.

Pushing himself backward, against posters of round-faced Westerners at a cocktail party, wine stacked in a connoisseur's cellar, Wang Jing proceeded toward Jianguomen Qiao, and the Dongbianmen railway station.

Last, last leg.

(IN UNISON):

"THERE'S NO GOING BACK"

"LONG STRIDES"

*

Chapter One: 'Remonstration in the Peach Garden'

"Zhao Dun had no choice but to stand aside and allow the duke and his entourage to enter the Peach Garden. His heart was full of rage and bitterness. As he glared at the retreating back of Tu'an Gu, he ground his teeth, and muttered to himself, 'A blockhead of a ruler, and a doomed country  all the fault of that rascally official.'"

*

Two days' returned from Xingtai  and his parents' funeral  Snail faced anarchy in Uncle Jia's village.

"You cannot be here," Longface Donkey told him. "They will struggle with you like they did with Li Fan."

"Yes, he should stay," Eunuch interjected. "His uncle will clear his name."

"Travel with us to Beijing," Condor said. "Red Guards travel free."

His schoolmates' wild looks unnerved him. What had happened to his friends  in a week?

"We'll see Chairman Mao!"

Hard gleam in their eyes.

"In Tiananmen Square!"

From Teahouse Corner, you could see the hastily constructed platform by Liu Hebei's peach orchards.

"What can I do if you won't speak up, Li Fan?" tugging at her ear  a sunflower in high wind.

At the nape of her neck, a red spot grew.

Then another.

Along the wire.

*

IV

RADIANT HARMONY:

"Look out, Wang Jing!"

Again?

His co-workers' cries echoed outside Dongbianmen station.

"Duck, you idiot!"

Shanghai passengers hurried through the gate  into Beijing crowds on the esplanade.

Snail peered at a woman  travelled long  as she received quiet welcome from her son, daughter-in-law, and their children.

There were many such scenes. This sun-filled  too bright  afternoon.

The slender, white-haired lady, marked by the years, stood patiently in slacks and pink blouse, ramrod stiff  as her relatives, at a cellphone, arranged their next move.

Home.

From her new bicycle cart, at Wang Jing's side, a beautiful, young American was selling peach cupcakes  lined-up impeccably, like guards, on the sheet of China Daily.

"Would you like a Western pastry?" she enquired, their sweet aroma wafting for miles around.

Here's my new China, he told himself, gazing instead at the Shanghai woman. Her son and his wife indicating the footbridge across Jianguomen Qiao. Without looking at them  yet good-naturedly enough  she raised her left shoulder as though raising a lifetime. The tailing-off of one particularly hard journey.

She stepped in Wang Jing's direction.

"You wouldn't like a cupcake?" intervened the American, all teeth and swinging legs. "Freshly baked this morning."

"Xiexie," Snail thought he said  thank you  reaching for what she offered, parting his lips.

In burgundy sandals, the Shanghai visitor was upon him. How serene she looked; how Li Fan. How long he could stay here  watching the Dongbianmen gate. Grow dim.

At Gong San Plaza  six seconds, and several miles behind  his torso lay, like a branch, across muddy tracks; head high on a first-storey girder. Mouth and neck stuffed with rag.